Hacker Attach Aftermath
Posted in OAImages News by John E. Pannell on February 23rd, 2008 at 11:08 pm As many now know this site and blog was offline most of last week. We were the victim of a hacker.
This was discovered and confirmed last Sunday night when I was having trouble with the mySQL engine that powers this blog. We needed to restart the server. It was at this point that it was confirmed that someone else was using this server without my knowledge. The hacker had been using the server’s resources for some time, running a password cracker. This explains some of the problems that had been experienced recently with accessing the site.
Most of the site is back to normal now, but a few issues elude me. Perhaps some of the techie folks reading this might be able to help.
– Can’t access site’s email from an external email program like Thunderbird our Outlook. The server is refusing connections on port 110. This appears to be an issue with sendmail.
– I can’t seem to configure subdomains, even though I believe the virtual host commands are correct. If I only put in the one for blog.oaimages.com, www.oaimages.com also goes directly to my blog instead of the site’s main page. If I put in one for both the blog and www.oaimages.com, both go to the site’s main page.
/var/www/html/wordpress should be the root for the blog subdomain
/var/www/html should be the root for the main domain.
This worked before, with the same structure, without any problem.
– I can’t install the GD perl module. In webmin it locks up right after the download. In cpan the make fails. There’s no unsatisfied dependencies I know of. I need this for some the graphs that were on the analysis page in the members area. I don’t remember having trouble installing GD before. Nothing I found online will tell me what’s wrong.
Are there any techies that can make sense of this? At this point in time I really have too many other things I should be doing to continue to muck around with this.
By the way, the person who fired me Thursday, in addition to be a former friend, was an officer in Eswau Huppeday back in the early 80s.
John,
I’m having an issue with the drop down menus on the front page (there not dropping down) when not signed in. (both in Firefox and IE 7) When signed in to members only, the drop downs work fine.
Also was showing someone how to create the PDF’s with Thumbnails at the Lodge #9 TOR yesterday and that seemed to be a problem to (at least in FF did not try IE).
The page navigation problem with the drop down menus is fix. It was a simple file permissions issue that I missed.
The PDFs are now available in the members area. This took a bit more work; had to reinstall some software.
Thanks, Bill, for letting me know about this.
I really hate the use of the term “hacker” in this case.
This guy was a vandal and a trespasser. A criminal, by most interpretations of the word. He was not a hacker.